1. Introduction

1.1 It is ironic that the most hallowed and
prestigious genre of music at the Court of Louis XIV, the tragédie
lyrique, is so poorly represented by published modern scholarly editions.
Tragédies lyriques by Jean-Baptiste Lully set the standard
for those who would follow, and while alive Lully's monopoly discouraged
virtually all competition. From his death in 1687 to the early years of
the eighteenth century, composers such as Pascal Collasse, Marc-Antoine
Charpentier, Henry Desmarest, Marin Marais, André Campra, and others—all
seasoned composers—took up the genre, competing with the constant stream
of Lully revivals. In the words of James R. Anthony, during this post-Lully préramiste interval "most important French composers moved
toward a rapprochement with the invading Italian style."(note
1)

1.2 Into the partial void left by Lully's
death also stepped Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, not yet thirty,
who had fashioned her reputation on the harpsichord as a respected performer
and improviser, and who had experience as a composer of pièces
de clavecin (1687) and an opéra-ballet entitled Jeux à l'honneur de la victoire (1691). However, in inevitable comparison
with her predecessor Lully, who wrote numerous ballets and comédie-ballets
before turning to tragédies lyriques, Jacquet de la Guerre
had sparse experience writing for the stage when she composed her only
tragédie lyrique, Céphale et Procris, in 1694.
While we await modern scholarly editions of most of Lully's stage works,
we owe a debt of gratitude to Wanda R. Griffiths for providing us with
a most useful reconstruction of Jacquet de la Guerre's work.

2. Editorial Choices

2.1 Manuscript and printed sources for late
seventeenth-century French stage works present the potential editor with
problems too numerous to detail here. Let us rather examine those faced
by Griffiths. Since no autograph manuscript is known to exist, she has relied
on a set of manuscript partbooks from the atelier of Henri Foucault
partially annotated by Sébastien Brossard (F-Pn Vm2
125), Brossard's manuscript arrangement of the prologue made for a 1696
performance, and a 1694 Ballard printed partition réduite.
Unfortunately none of the known sources contains the complete music, nor
can it be restored simply by conflating the sources. Griffiths has had to
compose the missing haute-contre, taille, and quinte de violon parts throughout
as well as interior vocal parts for several choruses. Her discussion of
methods behind the reconstructions and suggestion that she has "been more
conservative in both rhythm and voice crossings when realizing these internal
instrumental parts" (p. 276) clarify what appears in period sources and
what is editorial. Moreover, her use of italics for the names of instruments
or vocal parts which she has composed avoids the necessity of constant reference
to the critical apparatus. Griffiths never discusses whether there actually
are other known sources or if these are the only ones she used.

2.2 But Griffiths's aim is not to create
a scholarly edition per se, though what she produces shares various attributes
with such editions. In her words (p. 276), "this edition retains as much
as possible the musical text as found in the manuscript partbooks, while
putting this information into a useful performing edition [italics
by this reviewer], one in which issues of consistency must necessarily
override those of retaining insignificant details." (note
2) In spite of using the partbooks as a primary source, Griffiths
conflates her sources, taking continuo figures from one, Brossard's performance
indications from another and so forth. Conflation is something that has
been denigrated to generations of students, but in dealing with late seventeenth-century
French sources, where autographs are lacking, editors have increasingly
realized that harvesting layers of information from different sources
has its advantages. (note 3)

2.3 For a literary source, Griffiths has
relied on the famous early eighteenth-century Ballard collected edition.
It is unfortunate that she did not locate a libretto associated with the
1694 Paris Opéra performance in time to use it as a source for
her edition. The value of such librettos, which frequently contain lists
of performers and indications not reproduced in Ballard's collected edition,
cannot be underestimated. Recent work on literary sources for Lully's tragédies has clarified much about the production of librettos,
and it is a shortfall of the present edition that this work is nowhere
taken into account. (note 4) A strength, however, is the clear printing of the French livret with a
parallel English translation. Good English translations of librettos from
the préramiste period are few, and this one is a welcome
addition, even if the play itself is hardly representative of the best
literary work of the period.

2.4 In general, the editing seems to be both
careful and based on sound principles. There are, however, a number of
infelicities which mar an otherwise fine edition of a work by a woman
whose music is increasingly becoming appreciated even by readers of beginning
music-history anthologies. Unnecessary redundant accidentals are to be
found in various places (note
5) and continuo figures are not always handled consistently.
For Acts I–V Griffiths has used the Ballard print as her principal source
of figures, retaining the old Ballard procedures of putting vertical sets
of figures out of order (top to bottom 7,9,5; or 6-4 going to 5-7) and
adding missing figures in square brackets. On occasion first inversions
go unaccounted for by either Ballard or Griffiths, and raised or lowered
thirds of chords are similarly unmarked on others. (note
6) The Ballard print itself is quite inconsistent in how it
indicates final inversions of seventh chords, and Griffiths does not always
help the situation by adding editorial figures. More disturbing are instances
where the readings for voice and continuo are corrupt. The misplacement
of the figures on p. 76, m. 24 obscures a normal V7-I cadence
and mm. 11–12 on p. 77 must be in error. On p. 82, m. 21 the continuo
note is probably E, not C. (note
7)

3. Conclusions

3.1 If one makes it through the technical blemishes
there is much interesting music to read by a composer who had not only mastered
the Lullian idiom, as Griffiths rightly points out in her informative prefatory
remarks, but who also made significant departures from it. Even though the
work was unfavorably received and had a very short run of performances,
it provides us with fresh evidence of activity after Lully, and the efforts
of one of the rare women who wrote in the genre. Quibbles with editorial
infelicities aside, Griffiths's edition gives us a new perspective on the
music of Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. This edition is a welcome
addition to the growing corpus of tragédies lyriques being
published in modern editions.

References

*Carl B. Schmidt (e7m7SHM@TOE.Towson.edu)
is Professor and Chairperson of Music at Towson University. His Entrancing
Muse: A Documentary Biography of Francis Poulenc will be published by
Pendragon Press this year. He is also editing Lully's Roland for
the new Lully edition coordinated by Herbert Schneider and Jérôme
de La Gorce, and compiling a detailed catalogue of the music of Georges
Auric. Return to beginning

Notes

2. The unavailability of instrumental parts, however,
makes any performance of this work somewhat problematical. No mention
of parts is contained in the edition and none were supplied with the score.
Return to text

3. Editors working on the complex plethora of Lully
sources have been in the forefront of reexamining the use of sources in
creating a scholarly edition from this period. See, for example, Jean-Baptiste
Lully: The Collected Works, Series IV, Sacred Works, Vol. 5, ed. by
Anne Baker, John Hajdu Heyer, Lionel Sawkins, and Carl B. Schmidt (New
York: The Broude Trust, 1996 [reviewed
in this Journal, vol. 4.1 (1998)]). Return to text

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